Results: Crysis 3

It goes without saying that Crysis 3 can be made particularly demanding as you scale up detail settings. So, in order to run at 1920x1080 on these mid-range cards, we're using the Medium preset with motion blur and lens flares disabled (though we turned on 2x SMAA to smooth the edges).

The Radeon HD 7790 keeps up with AMD's Radeon HD 6870 and Nvidia's GeForce GTX 560, while the GeForce GTX 650 Ti falls back a little. Notice that all of the GeForce cards are hit with lower minimum frame rates in this game.

When we look at the frame rate over time, we see sharp valleys from Nvidia's cards. We noticed these strange pauses during game play, and they are causing the low minimum frame rate results. Further experimentation tells us that this is caused by the new 314.21 beta driver; the issue disappears when we switch back to 314.07.

The frame rate variance is a little higher than it was in Borderlands 2, but it's still under the 15 ms limit where we'd start to notice issues. Despite encountering pauses on the GeForce cards, frames seem to be showing up on-screen at regular intervals.

and perhaps they finally realized that they make crappy reference coolers at best and just let Sapphire go ahead and ship to Tom's lol. In all honesty, as an AMD exclusive partner, Sapphire should just go ahead and take over reference cooler design for AMD, they make some awesome stuff

and perhaps they finally realized that they make crappy reference coolers at best and just let Sapphire go ahead and ship to Tom's lol. In all honesty, as an AMD exclusive partner, Sapphire should just go ahead and take over reference cooler design for AMD, they make some awesome stuff

Only 5 gaming benchmarks makes it difficult to obtain a generalized sense of how these cards perform. Including F1 in that preciously short list is puzzling due to its unpopularity and aberrant performance results. As 1/5th of the gaming cumulative score, F1 single-handedly raises the 7790 score by several percentage points in relative value.

First of all, thanks for the review. I thought we were going to have to wait a bit more for the review but apparently I was wrong.

Is it impossible to give this card a 192-bit memory bus and a 1.5GB VRAM? At this point in time, I'd feel more comfortable buying or recommending a card with more than 1GB memory because most titles have start to use more than 1GB (granted some of them uses more only with AA applied but the point stands). The other reason is because I think that if there were going to be a 2GB version of the card, it's going to be overpriced and the card starts to lose it's value in the mid-range segment.

First of all, thanks for the review. I thought we were going to have to wait a bit more for the review but apparently I was wrong.

Is it impossible to give this card a 192-bit memory bus and a 1.5GB VRAM? At this point in time, I'd feel more comfortable buying or recommending a card with more than 1GB memory because most titles have start to use more than 1GB (granted some of them uses more only with AA applied but the point stands). The other reason is because I think that if there were going to be a 2GB version of the card, it's going to be overpriced and the card starts to lose it's value in the mid-range segment.

Games only need more than 1GB on cards that are fast enough for 1GB to be an issue. The Radeon 7850 is the slowest card to have consistent issues with this and even then, 1GB is almost always sufficient for it and it's considerably faster than the Radeon 7790, especially in VRAM-heavy situations. It's unlikely that 1GB will be an issue for this card at all.

I agree that a wider bus and then more memory would have helped performance greatly, but then it'd perform too closely to the Radeon 7850. Heck, it might even beat the 7850 unless its memory frequency was brought down significantly and it's GPU frequency might need to go down too. It's cost more for AMD to make, but it'd also overclock better. However, then it'd be replacing the Radeon 7850 1GB more than being a midway between the 7850 and the 7770.

It's good to see competition at this price point. However you never see reference GTX 650 Ti in retail. Every OEM (and most buyers) know that the GTX 650 Ti can be heavily overclocked, most chips reaching 1GHz easily. I don't expect to see major price drops on the NV card because of this.

i saw "Radeon HD 7790 Catalyst Beta Driver" in the test setups and benchmarks page. if this means that amd still doesn't have a launch driver, they should deliver one when 7790 starts selling at retail shops/website. the competitive benchmark performance and efficiency will translate to nothing if regular users don't get that.seems that power consumption for blu-ray playback is still dismal compared to 650tihttp://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/HD_7790_DirectCU_II_OC/24.htmlso much for dynamic clockrate selection.... if this is a driver issue, amd should fix it.

Thanks for the writeup. I look forward to seeing the overclock potential of this card.

Also, considering that the 7850 1GB is frequently available for $150 AR (Picked up a XFX Double D for $150 AR + games in February and the 2gb core edition is currently $160 AR), does it $150 price point really make much sense? I would have liked to see the 2gb version of this card around the $150 point instead of it starting at $150